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>I would be really surprised if, at any time, using any method, you could find anything that looked like a map inside the brain of a human, even while visualizi
by kyuudou 7y ago
>I would be really surprised if, at any time, using any method, you could find anything that looked like a map inside the brain of a human, even while visualizing a map.
No but there's probably a specific part of the brain that does deal with visual mapping.
I read this excellent article some years back about the test that aspiring London cabbies, the ones that drive the black cars, take and the preparation required "The Knowledge" to pass this difficult test. Since London's road system is so byzantine and requires lots of insider knowledge, it is unlikely that the cabbies will in the near future ever be supplanted by companies like Uber or Lyft.
Anyway turns out the gray matter in the posterior and anterior hippocampus of some of these guys were tested before and after studying for the test and there was significant growth. Perhaps this would be the place to start to pin down a neural equivalent to a real-world map.
https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-memory/ https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-memory/
- carapace 7y ago> there's probably a specific part of the brain that does deal with visual mapping. Sure! In fact, you could say that the eyes are the part of the brain that has a close isomorphism to (a tiny subset of the EM manifestation of) the real world. Once you get about 2-3 cm from the retinas, though, I think that information has been encoded in ways that make it unrecognizable from the outside. I'm saying I doubt we'll ever be able to decode a model (let alone a map) of London from studying a cab driver's hippocampus.
- hackinthebochs 7y agoThis is probably not true. There have been experiments where faces have been reconstructed by measuring the neural responses of monkey's when seeing faces: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40131242 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40131242
- carapace 7y agoWow, that's cool! Cheers! I have to adjust me "priors", as a Bayesian might say. Still, monkeys aren't humans, and faces aren't London. Recognizing faces and their expressions has been a thing since faces first evolved, eh?
- hackinthebochs 7y agoPlace cells have recently made the rounds in popular science which are basically the cognitive topological maps being discussed. The fidelity of these maps remain to be seen. Some examples: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14531 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14531 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08550-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08550-1